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What happened?

O

Ole Juul

Veteran Member
Joined
Aug 15, 2008
Messages
3,982
Location
Coalmont, BC, Canada
The forum was off line for a little while, and now it's back up but not working properly. There is no list of new posts, so I can't participate. :(

Also, if I click on start new thread, it asks me a random question and suggests that the user name Ole Juul is already in use. It's a bit of a mess, but the workaround is to use the little boxes at the top of the page to log in first.
 
I'm not getting the new-posts list either, instead there's some stupid-ass "activity feed" thing on the left that actually quotes new posts instead of just listing the threads, like it's trying to be a Twitter feed or something. It's annoying, and I'd like the old one back. The last thing we need is for a perfectly decent forum to start trying to ape social-networking sites.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Works fine for me. I wonder if you delete your VCF cookies that things will work again...

I'm using FF on XP.
Click to expand...

I'm using FF too, and deleting the cookies makes no difference. However, it is clear now that this is some kind of regrade. Clicking on new posts gives a list now that the buffer is filling up. At first it said no posts were available and offered a link to the posts of the last 24 hours. That could be a desirable link, but it just went off-line.

Ole Juul
(the log in thingie is still screwed up)
 
Unregistered said:
I'm using FF too, and deleting the cookies makes no difference. However, it is clear now that this is some kind of regrade. Clicking on new posts gives a list now that the buffer is filling up. At first it said no posts were available and offered a link to the posts of the last 24 hours. That could be a desirable link, but it just went off-line.

Ole Juul
(the log in thingie is still screwed up)
Click to expand...
Works for me, but the New Posts option is now a fine print selection on the second line. Seems like every update they change some things just for the fun of it; guess they figure following Microsoft's business model will make them rich...
 
MikeS said:
Works for me, but the New Posts option is now a fine print selection on the second line. Seems like every update they change some things just for the fun of it; guess they figure following Microsoft's business model will make them rich...
Click to expand...

Yes I found that. It only shows a few postings, but deleting cookies allows the use of the 24 hour link. It's a long way around, but at least it works.

- Ole Juul
 
Unregistered said:
Yes I found that. It only shows a few postings, but deleting cookies allows the use of the 24 hour link. It's a long way around, but at least it works.

- Ole Juul
Click to expand...
Is that like the 'Today's posts' option in the Quick Link pull-down?

And of course you can still Mark Forums Read and then in the New Posts select:

Sorry, there are no new posts to view.
You may search for posts updated during the previous 24 hours, here

Looks about the same, but a PITA to find the tiny New Posts.
 
Last edited:
MikeS said:
Is that like the 'Today's posts' option in the Quick Link pull-down?

And of course you can still Mark Forums Read and then in the New Posts select:

Sorry, there are no new posts to view.
You may search for posts updated during the previous 24 hours, here

Looks about the same, but a PITA to find the tiny New Posts.
Click to expand...

I see the Quick Link pull-down now. However it is not available from the new posts page. Yep, that's the 24 hour one. The other "new posts" link only shows a couple of the recent ones. What a mess. vBullein just gets worse and worse.

BTW, what's the thing about "Mark Forums Read". What does that do?

- Ole
 
MikeS said:
Marks all new posts as having been read, whether you read them or not, so next time you ask for New Posts you don't still see the ones you ignored because they didn't interest you.
Click to expand...

That's kind of what I thought, but since I don't have the intelligence to understand why one would not want to see what people have posted, it just seemed too bizarre to be true.

I must say, that this software is the most disgusting and antagonistic I've ever seen. Perhaps I live in an enchanted world of my own, but dealing with vBulletin is certainly not a pleasant task and takes a lot of the fun out of this forum.
 
This is not working for me. The 'activity thread' is useless as a way of reading unread posts, particularly as sometimes I'm away for some days. When clicking "What's New" I would see one, two, three or several more pages of threads with unread posts, go through the pages and select the threads of interest and click a bunch of them (on the 'from unread' icon). That worked great.
Now I simply can't read the forum.

This change really does not work.

-Tor
 
What's up? I went to sleep with this forum working fine. I wake up and it's got this!
 
Exactly, the buttons aren't where I've gotten used to them being at, and the Activity Feed feature is very disorganized. Erik, is it possible to revert back to the old theme?

EDIT: And I see that it updates it for EACH INDIVIDUAL POST, not keeping it how it used to be!
 
Ole Juul said:
That's kind of what I thought, but since I don't have the intelligence to understand why one would not want to see what people have posted, it just seemed too bizarre to be true.
Click to expand...

There are lots of areas that I'm not interested in--and other threads are just too inane to bother with, so yes, I do use the "Mark Forums Read" button occasionally to clear out things.
 
Chuck(G) said:
There are lots of areas that I'm not interested in--and other threads are just too inane to bother with, so yes, I do use the "Mark Forums Read" button occasionally to clear out things.
Click to expand...
Same here. I read/answer the ones that interest me and then clear the lot so I don't have to skip past them all again the next time; I can still see them in the 24 hr. view if I really want to. Aside from the New Posts button moving it doesn't really look much different, at least not the way I use it.
 
Okay, at least the old "new posts" page is still there, though I wish it were back on the main bar.

But if anyone in charge is reading, the "activity feed" page is useless, and here's why. Any given member here is only going to be interested in a particular subset of threads on the forum, which makes those threads and any posts in them noise. The old updates page uses one line for each thread, so only a small amount of space is wasted on threads you're not interested in, and one line out of a list is easy to ignore. The "activity feed," on the other hand, uses many times the space for not just each thread, but each post in each thread. So "noise" posts now take up more space than they did before, and if a "noise" thread is highly active it's going to be proportionally more represented. This makes the signal-to-noise ratio vastly lower than the old page, which means more work digging through to find the same things we always wanted.

(The fact that it's something you have to continually load bite-sized chunks of, and the fact that posts aren't grouped by thread - a.k.a. the entire point of a forum - isn't helping, either.)

I can live with ignoring it, as long as the good option remains, but I think you should know that it's useless crap.
 
There was a software upgrade last night. I wasn't aware that the "What's New" button functionality would change but I've always used the "new posts" link on the second line under the menu buttons anyway. Of course, that link slid over a spot to make room for the new activity feed.

There was a fairly major bug, caused by the VaultWiki code, that was preventing many of us from posting. That is now fixed with an update to VaultWiki. Sorry about the PITA there...

In the end, though, the changes are fairly minor - especially as compared to the switch to the new forum last year. There are some nice new features that I thought we could use, additional security and better performance both for users and at the server end.

I could have delayed implementing the new stuff, but not for very long as support starts to slip the older your stuff gets.

Hopefully y'all will get used to the new layout quickly. We didn't lose anything, after all, other than recognized placement.

If you're getting results totally out of whack or if things aren't working at all please clear cookies and refresh the browser (shift-refresh or restart the window) to see if that fixes it. The latter cleared my woes this morning.

Thank you for your patience and understanding and please do let me know if you continue to experience problems.
 
Aha, 'New Posts' button, slightly overshadowed by the bigger one that doesn't work anymore.. that's good enough for me if it does the job (I just hit 'mark forums read' so it doesn't do anything right now).

Thanks,
-Tor
 
I've now switched to the New Posts button, and it does display what the What's New button used to sisplay. Erik, would it be possible to change the redirect of the What's New button back to what it was, and leave the Activity Feed button under the light blue bar as it is now?
 
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